Tight timelines set for NBA’s return

It’s official: The NBA is coming back December 22.

The NBA and the National Basketball Players Association announced late on Monday that they’ve struck a deal on rules for this coming season, setting the stage for what will be a frenzied few weeks before games resume.

Teams will play a 72-game schedule, which will be revealed in the coming weeks. The league said a new system will be used to ensure that the split of basketball-related income continues, one of the many details that had to be collectively bargained with the union because the current agreement between the sides had a great deal of language that needed reworking because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Negotiations with free agents will be allowed to begin at 6 p.m. on November 20, with signings permitted starting at 12:01 p.m. on November 22 – an extraordinarily fast window for the NBA, which typically has about a week spanning the start of talks and the beginning of signings. But with training camps this year beginning December 1, both sides evidently feel there isn’t a need to draw out the process any longer than necessary.

RESHAPING ROSTERS

Many rosters could be considerably reshaped by then, with trades likely to be permissible again in the coming days – the exact details there still being worked out – and the NBA draft is set to take place November 18. Player and team options likely will be settled around that same time. Free agency starts two days after the draft, with around 100 players set for unrestricted status.

The salary cap and tax level will remain unchanged. The cap was US$109.14 million this past season, with the tax level at US$132,627,000. The real numbers will be affected by the shortened schedule – last year’s numbers were based on the standard 82-game season, a threshold that won’t be reached this year.

The salary cap for 2021-22 is guaranteed to rise somewhere between 3% and 10%, the league said, which means it’ll be somewhere between US$112.4 million and US$120.1 million.

The league’s board of governors will vote to finalise the deal, which is a formality.

There are countless other issues to work out, such as all the health and safety protocols now that games won’t be played in the safety of a bubble and teams will be travelling to various cities once again.

Players were tested daily in the bubble, and nobody tested positive because of the very strict protocols. It’ll be much tougher to avoid a COVID-related issue with the league back to some sort of normality this season.